


Recessional

by Koren M (CyberMathWitch)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Choices, Gen, Infinity Gems, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-27
Updated: 2014-08-27
Packaged: 2018-02-14 23:52:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2207715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyberMathWitch/pseuds/Koren%20M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one who encounters an infinity gem escapes unscathed.</p>
<p>
  <span class="small"></span>
  <br/><i>That isn't necessarily a bad thing</i>
  <br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	Recessional

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SneakyHufflepuff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SneakyHufflepuff/gifts).



> For SneakyHufflepuff's prompt:
>
>> Natasha and/ or Clint get sent back into time to Natasha's early childhood. They have to choose between maintaining the timeline and saving bby!Natasha from her fate. 
>> 
>> (If they change things: Rhodey's suit kills Iron Man in the Avengers, the portal doesn't get closed in Avengers, HYDRA isn't discovered soon enough and the Helicarriers go active, etc)
> 
> The lyrics and title come from [Vienna Teng's "Recessional"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGKicxfFtsw). The fic was definitely written with the melody firmly in mind.
> 
> It's an odd little piece, twisty and knotted the way time travel often is. (It's also unbeta'd, unfortunately.) Thanks, as always, to SweetWaterSong for helping me bounce around ideas for this piece.
> 
> This can be read as either 'shippy or gen.

_she's looking to me, straight to center  
No room at all for any other thought. _

Natasha remembers being on the battlefield with Clint and the others a few moments (a lifetime) ago, but everything is distorted by the orange light from the stone held between their clasped hands. It reflects off the little girl's hair, and the ribbons on her nightgown, and Natasha doesn't know how she got here or where she came from. She feels herself shifting in and out of her body even as she watches herself, older, then younger, then back again. At first, she tries to keep track of which one is real until she has a moment of clarity and realizes that she's _both_.

" _Who are you?_ " she asks herself in Russian, the inflection she remembers from childhood.

" _We are Natasha,_ " she replies, and she can almost hear it echoing around the three of them.

Natasha feels power pressing against her awareness like a living thing, pulsing with the sinuous rhythm of time itself and she can almost see... _everything_. She can see her past, she can see her futures (a hundred thousand billion of them, each altered by the slightest hesitation or the difference in the length of a breath) and she can see the winding, twisting, knotted paths that have led her here. Now. Back to herself.

She wonders if Clint can see them too. She can see his paths, a faint tracery behind her own, although hers are stronger because she's here and now _she's_ here so they're squared. (Just as quickly as that realization comes she pushes it away because her mind reels at the trap and she's reminded strongly of what happens when to mirrors are turned to face one another.) 

Clint looks at her, and then she knows he's seeing _everything_. Just like she's hyper-aware of what will bring her to this point, just as she's looking at it from the perspectives of both memory and fearful expectation, she can feel his horror and his sorrow at what she will have to endure, has endured. Clint hasn't quite made the same connections she has, because he's not inside her mind, just observing it, he knows her older self and her younger self are the same person but he can't grasp that they're really the _same thing_.

He latches onto a thread suddenly and tugs hard. The three of them tumble down some kind of cosmic rabbit hole and they're on the street in Nizhny, in front of her family's apartment building. She finds that she's back in her older body, her younger self standing on the street corner in a puddle and she remembers what it felt like to get water in her shoes.

Younger Natasha tries to pull away, scared and confused, but Clint grips her around the waist before she can step out into the street. Natasha can hear her yelling, but her present attention is on the figures getting out of a car at the corner because she knows what this is. _When_ this is.

Already, pieces are shifting in her mind, realigning, different images coming to the forefront. They're _changing_ things, but without being in the flux she can't see how.

As bad as it is, there are so many worse ways this story could go.

"Put me down!" she tries, risking taking her eyes off the men on the street to turn and grab his arm. Clint's not hurting her, he never would, but he's bigger and stronger and her younger self only knows what little ballet she's pretended to dance after watching the girls on the stage. She doesn't know how to fight, won't learn for awhile yet what it will take to make someone let go.

"Natasha, it brought us here. We can save her," he pleads, and it's 'her' not 'you' because things aren't so clear to him.

Something breaks in the back of her mind, just a little bit, like a piece of herself falling away. There's a gap where a memory used to be, a face, the sound of a voice that she suddenly can't quite make out anymore.

_And I know I don't want this, oh, I swear I don't want this.  
There's a reason not to want this but I forgot. _

Inside the building someone shouts for help.

There are gunshots, and the men leave, and the car speeds away and it's all breaking, breaking; Natasha screams - older, younger, it's all the same. She looks up and she looks over and they don't recognize the man that's holding them and they're scared and there's so much light - 

Natalia tugs on the stone, holds onto herself, and with a tearing sensation they're gone.

*****

The man isn't brought along with her. It doesn't make any sense. Nothing here does.

She's between again, her smaller hand in a her bigger hand, holding her smaller hand...

No. Something about mirrors and forever and she shies away from the thought.

No.

She doesn't look down/up into her own eyes. It's too much and not enough and she will never, ever come back out again.

Feedback loop. She understands/doesn't understand those words. That language.

Where is she?

_Natalia._

No.

_Natasha._

Yes.

That part's important.

She looks around, and she's standing in the middle of ghosts. They are half-formed shadows and outlines, not just people but cars, streets, buildings, one on top of another going about their business. Natasha struggles to hold on to her sense of what's real. _All_ of these moments are as true as the next one. 

She is between.

It snaps back to her then, sudden and sharp in her mind. Between means being able to choose a path to step on to. The hand in her own tightens and she takes the risk and looks down.

Back and forth again, but she's held herself together through much worse than this. She can keep her mind together now. 

"We can find a better one," Natalia says. "Without the bad people in it."

"There are no paths without bad people, _doushenka_." Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the threads and she remembers with sudden clarity how Clint had pulled on one before.

Clint. That part is important, too.

Natalia is terrified, and rightly so. Ghosts though they may be, the scenes surrounding them aren't pleasant ones. If she tries hard enough, Natasha can make out paths more familiar to her. They have a different feel to them as they settle against her mind.

The crystal between her hands flares again, and it feels like her mind is expanding, swallowing the world whole, trying to take everything in. She reaches out for the familiar, and is bombarded with images. Just as quickly, she can feel herself - her other self - struggling to push them away.

" _Doushenka_ , no," she protests even as her own memories swamp her.

Natasha can remember the smell of her mother's perfume and her father's books. She remembers her grandmother's hands and the click of her knitting needles and the delicate cobwebs of thread, soft and fragile in the lace of her shawls and how they felt around her shoulders when she was cold. She looks at herself, still so uncertain, so small. She bites at her lip and looks at their hands, and realizes she has a chance to make a _choice_ that she never had before.

Together she reaches out and pulls on one thread after another, and a another. Down each length she sees a different life. One that leads to ballet and the stage, or to short, tumultuous love, others to a quiet home and a family. Short and long, peaceful and violent, all of them different mixtures of good, bad, and indifferent moments.

The orange stone is warm against her palms and she almost thinks she can feel it pulsing with a heartbeat matching her own. Like flicking a harp string, the story plays out. Natasha lets herself watch for awhile.

When she makes her decision, they don't have anything to say to one another. Natalia is sure; Natasha knows.

She reaches out to the appropriate strand, finds the point that they've come from, and _pulls_.

*****

She chooses to choose.

To know that each step, each moment, is a choice, even if she can't remember what that choice is.

When she is five, and she wakes up in the cold and deathly quiet, before the screaming starts; she holds her breath and reminds herself she will be strong.

When she is fourteen and she lands on her knees and tastes the blood from her split lip, when they tell her it was not good enough and she must try again, she smiles to herself because she knows she will be better than they could ever imagine.

When she looks into the eyes of each man, woman, and child that she kills, she knows there is a reason for it beyond her orders, just out of her reach, but _important_.

It is her first memory when she wakes up, and her last thought each time they wipe her clean and start all over again.

No matter what it is they make her do, she will endure it.

This is her choice.

*****

"So, thing is, I'm supposed to kill you now," he says, eyeing her with respect but not fear.

The arrow in her shoulder burns, but she bares her teeth in a smile, because she can feel that the pieces are finally, _finally_ starting to fall into place. "But you won't."

**Author's Note:**

> To the best of my google-fueled understanding, _doushenka_ is a Russian term of endearment meaning roughly "little soul", which I thought fitting and appropriate.


End file.
